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My Shoe Size? It'll Cost You

Companies are willing to pay big money to learn the juicy tidbits of your life, including your preferred brand of toilet paper or whether you smear your bagels with butter or cream cheese.

The problem is, they're not paying you.

A new website hopes to remedy this situation by allowing consumers to sell their personal data directly to advertisers.

"Your information is just that – yours," said Tracy Coyle, founder of Itsmyprofile.com. "If someone else benefits from that information, you deserve compensation for its use."

Coyle is the same woman who tried to auction off her private data over the Internet last year. The 42-year-old office manager answered 378 questions commonly asked by marketers regarding her financial status, health and religious beliefs, but no one made a bid.

Her new effort aims to find at least 20,000 other souls willing to sell themselves on the Net. Although the website is rather rudimentary, she says her concept is rock-solid.

"It really addresses the idea behind the Internet – individuals being able to control content," Coyle said. "I'm just saying people can control it better themselves than by giving it to every Tom, Dick and Harry website that's out there."

Coyle plans to charge advertisers 14 cents to access each member's 1,300-question profiles and 25 cents to send members e-mails, which are routed through her site to avoid their resale. And like any good businesswoman, she'll keep a cut of the profit for herself.

There are other sites offering opt-in e-mail services where members sign up to receive spam from selected advertisers or get prizes for clicking on banner ads or websites. One even announced plans to split revenue from personal data sales with consumers. But the idea appears to have frizzled; multiple phone inquiries to Zimtu went unanswered.

Coyle's plan is innovative because it allows people to control their contact with advertisers and to delete their information at anytime, said Sandeep Krishnamurthy, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Washington.

"If I understand her idea, it is that the consumer will own the profile and hence, will control future sale of it. If that is true, then that is new stuff," he said. "That would be great."

But one analyst was ambivalent about the startup.

"It's certainly better than the system in place right now where you don't get any compensation for your profile and are rarely asked for your consent," said Beth Givens, the executive director of the Privacy Clearinghouse.

"But her privacy policy is a little weak. She doesn't talk about what happens to data if she goes out of business or her website is bought by another company. If I were a consumer, I wouldn't fill it out."